This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.

How to give yourself a heart attack!

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Apply a service pack to server and then reboot it remotely!

Took over 15 mins to come back up!

I had my car keys in my hand and was almost out the door when suddenly the server responded to a ping, thank f**k!

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hahaha

Been there so many times!

Most recent was when I installed SP2 for Exchange 2003 at the behest of a customer convinced it would fix their problems with slow shutdowns of the server due to Exchange conflicting with Windows - it didn't fix them and instead appead to make the server flatline after rebooting - hence a trip up to central London at 3 AM.

Oh the ignominy of it all when i got there and discovered they'd had a power cut (their power is notorious for being up and down as it sits on the same overloaded substation as a load of the major shops on Regent Street and there is often work carried out overnight which causes things to trip out)

Reminds me of the time that one of my workmates was trying to fix a replication problem between 2 DCs. After some config changes on both DCs they were restarted, for some reason the DC on the remote site didnt come back up, major panic set in!

Drove out to the remote site (over an hour drive) and it turns out the DC was shutdown and not restarted!

A few years back, I ended up as Project Manager for the Chip & Pin rollout in a major (one of the top four) supermarket chain in the UK (now don't get excited - I was project manager for the engineers - not the technical side, so I wasn't earning 300 grand a year or anything).

Before getting promoted, I started out on the project as a bog-standard 'team leader', managing a team of engineers responsible for upgrading the EPoS systems in the front of store areas (EPoS means 'computerised tills' for all those not in the know!).

I loved this job - the money was OK and all the upgrades were done at night, which suited me well at the time.

Anyhoo - I once turned up to a store in the centre of London with my team of guys and we started the upgrade. It quickly became apparent that this was not going to be a run of the mill night when we discovered one of the tills was DOA. We weren't actually expected to fix them when they were FUBARed on arrival, but, stupidly, I wanted to have a good old root around inside one. Popping the lid on it, I was greeted with something that looked amazingly like somebody had replaced every single component with a sort of pinkish-red gel-like substance. It was the most bizarre site you've ever seen - every part of the interior was covered like some kind of modern art masterpiece - the Mobo, PCI slots, CPU, RAM modules, HDD, heatsink - everything.

The culprit? Well, to this day I'm not entirely sure, as no comprehensive chemical analysis was performed, but sitting next to the machine, like some guilty little schoolboy, was a three quarters empty, value-sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Apparently, one of the staff on the shift before had been pretty desperate to get away early, and decided to pour the erstwhile indigestion remedy into the case of the machine (there was a simple way of popping the lids on them without anyone ever knowing they'd been opened).

I've always wondered what would happen if I tried that on some of the servers that have caused me problems in the past...

CertForums.com is not sponsored by, endorsed by or affiliated with Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco®, Cisco Systems®, CCDA™, CCNA™, CCDP™, CCNP™, CCIE™, CCSI™; the Cisco Systems logo and the CCIE logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. All other trademarks, including those of Microsoft, CompTIA, VMware, Juniper ISC(2), and CWNP are trademarks of their respective owners.